


Rimbound

by Vintar



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-09-20
Updated: 2013-09-20
Packaged: 2017-12-27 02:49:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,193
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/973417
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vintar/pseuds/Vintar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jade discovers that space isn't as empty as it probably should be, John and Rose are entirely respectable citizens, and Karkat makes his displeasure known across several countries. Some snippets from a Discworld fusion, previously posted on tumblr.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

A barrage of waves crashed against the hull of the S. S. Hellmurder, temporarily drowning out the conversation. Something that had been caught up in the pull of the waves smashed into the ship with a boom, making all the portholes rattle. Jade rummaged through the many pockets of her greatcoat for a scrap of string, in the process emptying out a collection of notes, pens, jerky saved for later, and all the general detritus of the respectable sailor scientist. Once she had found a likely-looking specimen, she knotted it around her little finger to remind herself to check the outside for damage when the tides had settled down.

"—look into space, though!" Feferi continued. Her transparent face was calm, but inside her head a school of tiny quicksilver fish darted to-and-fro restlessly. "Molecules, stars… it’s so boring! The ocean is much more interesting." She grinned her glass-clear grin. " _So_ much more interesting. Anyone can look at space.”

Jade adjusted her spectacles (too big, but they still somehow managed to pinch her nose; she'd have to keep an eye out on the nets for a pair that fitted better) and squinted at the jars of nails on the shelf, counting quickly and thinking about hull damage. “Anyone can look at the ocean, too! People from all over go do it on the coast. They put it on postcards!”

"That’s not the real ocean, though." Feferi swung her legs from her perch on Jade’s desk, then rolled onto her feet. The kelp caught up in her head swung free as she turned her neck, spattering the desk with fat drops of water. Jade, long since used to Feferi’s visits and the waterlogged paperwork that they caused, flicked her lab reports aside to safety. "The real ocean has nothing in common with space.”

Feferi walked across the floor; the water from her damp feet lay for a moment in the shape of human footsteps, then rolled after her to slip back into her heels. “Well, except for the Old Ones,” she said, and slid out of the porthole with a grin.

Jade bolted from her desk and leant out of the porthole, holding her glasses in place. Far below her Feferi picked her way along the wreckage of the ship, held in place by the volcanic rock speared into its underside. The sharp edges of the rocks must have cut into her hands and feet as as she clambered down to the water, but she didn’t seem to notice. “What do you mean?” Jade yelled, catching a mouthful of salt-spray and her own windswept hair for her trouble.

"Nothing!" Feferi trilled.

"Fine!" Jade shouted, louder than was strictly necessary to compensate for the noise of the wind. "I don’t care! Be mysterious all you want! And tell Eridan to bring my sextant back, it’s not what he thinks it is!"

Feferi slipped back into the water. The school of fish that had been caught up in her body bolted into the ocean, clearly none too pleased with their unexpected journey. Feferi cupped her hands to her mouth and shouted up as she came apart in the waves. “He thinks it’s for nautical navigation!”

Jade snorted. “Well, tell him to bring it back anyway!”

The porthole shut with an awful creak; outside, the seabirds nesting on the roof started to squawk in alarm. Bec, lolling on the floor, raised his ears curiously for a moment. When no threat appeared, he went back to his doggy duties, namely chewing on a rib the length of his own body and paying no attention to the yellow fat staining his salt-white fur. Jade absent-mindedly scratched him between the ears as she passed him, then wiped her hands on her trousers.

Jade untied the purple string (for morning tea with friends!) from her thumb and stuffed it back into a pocket full of marbles, chalk, and bolts threaded on wire. She splayed out her hands and checked her afternoon schedule: pink string to remind herself to salt the morning’s catch, red string for checking the nets for fresh wreckage, and bright green string for…

She jogged down the hallway, automatically rolling her stride over the water-warped floorboards where the cracked walls had let in sea-spray. The rimwards portion of the ship, formerly the galley, had been commandeered into a laboratory, albeit one that used chipped mugs in place of volumetric flasks. The dining table had been replaced with a winch, solidly bolted to the floor and attached to an anchor chain, each link the size of her paired fists. The chain led out of a makeshift window over the kitchen sink, more hole than porthole; it had taken Jade half an hour with an axe to clear it.

She climbed up onto the sink, braced her hips on the lower edge of the hole, and leant out over the edge of space. For a moment there was the impression of something moving below, but then spray from the rimfall spotted up her glasses. She gave them up and squinted down, holding her damp bangs out of her eyes, but below the ship nothing moved but the anchor chain, swinging slowly in space.

It had been a long wait for the correct bits and pieces to show up in the nets, but when they had it had been easy work to fashion something that would jar a slice of space for further examination. She’d rigged a bottle with a lid that would open when the anchor chain was at full extension and close when it wasn’t, and any self-respecting scientist would have approved of it, even though the bottle merrily sported a dairy logo. As far as Jade was concerned, it was the jaunty cow of progress!

It took an hour or more to winch it all in, several shipwrecks worth of anchor chains fastened together coming in as she turned the winch handle. Jade knew she was getting somewhere when the segments started to come back cold enough to nearly freeze-burn her hands through her thick leather gloves (each glove from a different pair! damn people for not keeping both their gloves on while drowning!!)— and then almost anticlimactically the bottle came through the window, and definitely anticlimactically slid into the sink.

Inside the bottle was a sample of sub-disc atmosphere, a thin sheen of condensation, and a letter. In a neat grey hand, it read: _hello?_

Jade stared at it for a while, then slowly untied all the strings from her fingers. “Bec!” she shouted, scrambling for a pencil. “Get my maps, boy. We’ve got work to do!”


	2. Chapter 2

The city was quiet as Rose climbed the ivy up to the roof of John’s house. Placed on the side of what slight elevation passed for a hill in Ankh-Morpork, there was a lovely view. The riverside lights gleamed gently on the surface of the Ankh, and also on someone who was drunk enough to think that sleeping on the river was a good idea, and who would hopefully wake up before he was carried too far away from his lodgings. 

Well, one hoped that he was only drunk. John belonged to a respectable family who owned a respectable property, but it happened to be on the edges of Ankh, where the proximity of Morpork was to respectability what a sharp fingernail was to a pair of good stockings. Townsfolk tended to wend their way back along the river from the Morpork pubs, singing and fighting and shouting their woes to the world; sneaking up onto the roof at night and listening in had done much for increasing the size of Rose and John’s vocabularies, although only the portions of it that could not be used within hearing distance of their parents.

John was waiting for her with two bowls of stew and a plate of bread rolls. “Hey, Rose! How’d it go? Pull up a seat.”

Rose primly mimed drawing out a chair, then sat down and dangled her boots off of the gutter next to him. “It went well.”

He gaped at her, bread dripping stew into the garden below. “You’re a wizard?”

"There is only a monstrously complicated pile of paperwork and several years of regretting my academic choices between me and wizardhood."

John gave her a solemn look, and also a fork. “Rose. I have one question. It’s serious, and super important.” He pointed a bread roll at her. “Did the fake beard help?”

Rose stole the roll. “Well, it certainly didn’t hurt.”

"Yesss," he said, and punched the air. "I knew it! For true gag potential something has to work in deadly serious situations, Rose, not enough people realise this."

"You will rise through the ranks of the conjurer’s guild like a shooting star, albeit one with an alarming fondness for joy buzzers." She scooped up a potato. "Also, I made mention of the fact that Braseneck College started letting in female students last year, and then pointed out that my beard was both more erotically voluminous and more realistic than any facial hair belonging to the first years." 

"I can see that," John said. "You’re still wearing it."

"It goes with my eyes," Rose said, and wiggled her eyebrows until he snorted. 

"Alright," he said, after sufficient stew had been consumed and the man in the river had been swept past the dangerous Ankh rapids (i.e. some beer bottles that had been thrown in). "Come on, I have to show you something I’ve been working on."

Rose put down her bowl and got to her feet. “Do I run the risk of being electrocuted?”

"Probably… not…?" John frowned at the air, thinking it through, then shook his head decisively. "Probably not."

"Fair enough," Rose said. "Lead on, maestro."

John led her down to the bottom of his property to the garden shed, a place that she knew from too many games of hide-and-seek contained nothing more than rusty watering cans and illegally large spiders. He wheeled out a contraption covered in a sheet, a handspan taller than he was, and positioned it on the hill with annoying levels of finickiness. After spending a minute adjusting it back and forth over what seemed to be a matter of millimeters, he whipped the sheet off with a flourish.

Rose looked at the racks of tic-tac-toe lanterns for a moment before it sunk it. “John, hacksing is illegal!”

He fumbled a box of matches from his pocket and rolled his eyes. “Yeah, but no-one’s going to notice! We just face a crappy suburb for jerks, no-one’s going to call the watch. Also, it’s totally worth it.”

The important thing about points of light was that they were mostly just points of light. If you were a night-time clacks operator looking for transmissions from the next clacks tower along the line, you looked for lights of the correct size and placement. However, it was entirely possible that said clacks operator might accidentally pick up an array of lights from a different source, as long as said source was placed in a certain way and had lights of a size to suggest that it was further away than it really was. This was especially likely to occur if someone carefully measured distances and experimented with what size of lantern iris would produce what level of brightness.

The Watch had come down on Hard Clacksing, most likely driven by clacks carriers incensed that they were carrying messages for free. At least, they’d said, postmen got nice hats.

John fiddled with the array of shutters and apertures, blowing spiders from the lanterns. “I’m not so great at it right now, but I got on to someone hacksing from the other side of the disc, and talking to him is really fun!”

Far beyond the distant vague blur of the city walls, a square of lights began to flicker on and off. “Oh shit, that’s the incoming signal!” John bolted into the shed and came out with a pad of paper and a pencil. “Hold on to your beard, Rose, hehehe!”

"Consider my beard firmly grasped," Rose said.

The lights in the distance blinked on and off for a minute, and John’s pencil jumped around the page in bizarre clacks notation. Eventually it stopped, and he stuck his tongue out in concentration as he read the page.

Rose leaned over his shoulder to look at the muddle of dashes and dots. “So what wisdom did your mysterious hackser friend impart?”

"He says that I am the dumbest person to ever put flame to lantern, that I am a pustule on the art of hacksing, and that I should stop contaminating the air with my inane garage. Oops, sorry, missed a dot. With my inane garbage." John gestured to a segment of rapid dash-dotting. "And here he tells me to do something that I don't think anyone's actually flexible enough to do."

Rose considered this for a moment. “I think you should tell him how happy you are to hear from him, and then tell him all about your day. In excruciating detail.”

John grinned and reached for the shutters. “Already on it.”


End file.
